THE NEW SLAVERY

Thanks to Stephen Spielberg, Abraham Lincoln once again walks across America, in long, lanky, and at the same time reticent strides.

Public television is riding the crest of this new “ Lincoln-maina ”, presenting us with a long string of documentaries, all concerning themselves with Abraham, and Mary Todd……..and I’ve tried to watch every single one of them.

In fact, as Martin Luther King Day draws near, the Black American’s long journey out of slavery is in the PBS spotlight a lot.

Recently, I watched one such historical documentary titled “ The Abolitionists ”, and I was struck by the story line that drove the program. It was the Abolitionist’s great struggle to convince America that “ PEOPLE WERE NOT PROPERTY ”.

For some reason that phrase about people, and property, ran a loud, clanging, bell in dark corners of my mental filing cabinet, and it took me a minute to figure out why that had happened.

Just as “ The Emancipation Proclamation ” made clear that people were NOT property, a recent Supreme Court ruling took steps away from that common sense conclusion, by declaring that “ paper constructions ”, in the form of legal corporations, were in the eyes of the law of the land deserving of “ personhood ”, and so redefined them as such.

Afoot today, across America, is the widely recognized fact of the huge inequality of the distribution of wealth. An inequality that embraces, and that takes ownership of, economic wealth, and real influence in the day to day details of the nation’s governance.

When 1% of the population owns 80% (est) of the assets, the idea than the wealth of the nation is in any way “ distributed ” becomes laughable.

Given the fact of this grotesquely distorted “ distribution ” of wealth, and economic decision making, you have to wonder, first, why does the 99% allow such a condition to exist, and further down the line, historians will be tasked with the job of explaining how such inequality came to be ?

Not owning a gun, I’m forced to join the questioning historians in probing the how’s, and the whys, of such a heist by the 1%.

How did the nation’s economic structure transfer to so few hands, and what does it mean ?

How, and why, are pretty much tangled up in the same paragraph.

The banking system, in consort with a political system that is susceptible to, and relies on, incumbents that sell everything they own, their votes essentially, in the interest of “ re-election ”. This deadly tandem is one half of the equation.

The other half is a Supreme Court that bestows “ personhood ” on corporations, and in doing so, reopens the former slave markets.

We all end up “ owned ” by the 1%, and we all pick the cotton they choose to plant. It’s a new, more subtle, form of slavery, but make no mistake. This way of doing things has us all “ working for the company store. ”

Like I said, I don’t own a gun, and all the recent talk of gun control has no place in my daily conversation, but there are a lot of hot tempered Second Amendment-ists out there, and one of these days they are going to wake up, and it won’t be pretty.

“ We have nothing to lose but our chains ” will take on a whole new meaning.